June 29, 2017 began with a hot, humid morning in South Florida. That's when 16-year-old Zack Martin collapsed on the practice field.
"He was just in this awful, awful state," Martin's mom, Laurie Martin Giordano, told Scripps News. "There was a coach sitting behind him on the ground, basically propping him up. His eyes were rolled back in his head."
Giordano says her son's internal temperature had climbed to 107 degrees. There was no ice tub on the field to cool him down.
"It causes so much damage, so much internal damage when you're at that level for that long," she said.
Eleven days later, Zack passed away, his death becoming one of a dozen other preventable tragedies that happened on high school football fields in the U.S. that year due to heat.
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"When you see statistics that say, '100% have survived when they've been put in ice and water immediately' — 100%. That's powerful," Giordano said.
According to the Korey Stringer Institute — a not-for-profit named after the Minnesota Vikings player who died of heat illness that aims to prevent heat-related deaths — only 14 states require ice tubs at practices and games. Florida is now one of them thanks to Giordano's push to enact the Zachary Martin Act. But some states have no heat rules.
Georgia used to lead the nation in football-related heat deaths. Now the state has some of the strictest guidelines.
"All we've said is that when the temperatures get hotter and hotter, we have to make modifications," said Dr. Bud Cooper, clinical professor and education coordinator at the University of Georgia. "We shorten the practice. We lessen the intensity. We take off equipment. But more importantly, there is a threshold that says when it gets to a certain level, practice has to be canceled."
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At Heard County High School in Georgia, coaches are taking heat safety one step further to protect their players with a new $9 million pavilion covering their practice field, keeping temperatures about 20 degrees cooler.
"There's a lot of teams in the state of Georgia on a day like today that they would have to not be in pads or they could only be outside for so long, and we're able to practice normally like nothing's going on," said Shane Lasseter, head coach at Heard County High School.
Lasseter says since the pavilion opened in June, 25 other Georgia high schools have expressed interest in doing the same.
For Giordano, that's a win. She hopes all states will enact rules to prevent heat deaths.
"I know that a lot of people think that exertional heatstroke is rare, but it's not," she said.
